I’m feeling a bit less than inspired today, and part of the reason is likely because of all of the depressing stories I’ve been reading this week. Take this one for example: A recent post rapidly going viral over on Ancient Code, the ad-choked click-bait ancient astronaut website of Ivan Petricevic, claims that the skeleton of a giant, seven-foot-tall “hellhound” had been excavated at Leiston Abbey in Suffolk, and the massive animal may have inspired the legend of the monstrous dog Black Shuck. That’s all well and good except that Petricevic gives no source, and when we trace the claim back to its first publication in the Daily Mail in May 2014, we discover that the dog was seven feet long, not seven feet tall. Granted, seven feet is exceptionally long for a dog, but it’s certainly nowhere close to the dog being seven feet tall!

I also read a depressing excerpt from a new book on owls and UFOs. Yes, owls and UFOs. Author Mike Clelland has a new book called The Messengers: Owls, Synchronicity and the UFO Abductee that the Daily Grail assures me is receiving rave reviews from UFO believers. In the books, Clelland claims that people who witness UFOs are at an increased likelihood to rescue wounded owls, and he says that this anecdotal observations suggests that owls serve as messengers for space aliens. Clelland cites Exoconsciousness author and alien contactee Rebecca Hardcastle Wright to the effect that these owls are psychic projections from the aliens who communicate messages about the non-reality of reality, as she learned when discussing the nature of reality with one such owl. “This is one of many examples of how hard it can be to truly know what might be a real owl, and what might be a screen image,” Clelland said.

He went on to describe other instances of people who had spiritual encounters with owls, including a woman named Louise who had frequently seen UFOs, and around the time she was diagnosed with cancer she saw an owl and later dreamed of meeting an angel. The author means for us to interpret the collection of events as evidence that spiritual beings or space aliens intervened to ensure Louise would survive cancer, but the author provides nothing to support the implication. But Clelland feels that this is OK because he believes that the UFO-owl enigma exists outside of “the tidy box of logic.”

Someone approaching this material from a logical and rational perspective would start by questioning whether there is truly any connection between owls and UFOs beyond the suggestion that fantasy-prone individuals are more likely to ascribe supernatural motives to ambiguous events. But Clelland feels that this is too limiting an approach because it denies the idea that there is a meaningful force managing all of the world’s coincidences—synchronicity. This is itself a fallacy, one that misunderstands the fact that unusual coincidences are inevitable given the sheer volume of events that occur each and every day. There is a force that imposes meaning on them, but all measureable evidence indicates that it is the observer’s mind that creates that meaning.

What, however, was most enlightening is Clelland’s confession that UFOs are not for him a scientific question but a spiritual one, an inward-focused fetish object for meditating on one’s own place in the universe and connection to the supernatural. Note the implicit equivalence of spirituality with UFO investigation in this passage:

I have a friend who meditates, goes to spiritual retreats, has a guru and all that stuff. When we talk we both really get into it. We’ll push each other, struggling to articulate elusive metaphysical concepts, and the conversation ends up getting deeper and deeper. We fall into a kind of spiritual one-upmanship, and at some point he’ll get all frustrated and tell me, “I can’t believe you don’t meditate!” And I’ll snap back, “I can’t believe you don’t read UFO books!”

I can almost understand the impulse to turn aliens into angels and focus one’s spirituality on a semi-tangible manifestation of the supernatural, but at the same time, it seems rather a threadbare faith to look for a literal deus ex machina, not to mention a concession that ufology has long ago left science behind and entered the land of mysticism and the unknowable. Indeed, Clelland’s excerpt closes with his belief that reality’s nature is unknowable and therefore only self-exploration of one’s inner being can bring true knowledge. That, too, seems like a rather limiting philosophy, one that elevates the self above all and subordinates reality to the ego.

But to conclude today, I thought I’d mention news on a somewhat different subject. Many of you will remember TV producer Kevin Burns as the force behind such wretched stink bombs as Ancient Aliens, In Search of Aliens, America’s Book of Secrets, and The Curse of Oak Island. Burns is now overseeing a new comic book series that is adapting two unproduced scripts for the 1960s Lost in Space TV series. (He wrote the 1998 TV movie about the series, Lost in Space Forever.) I certainly don’t begrudge Burns his fun in branching out to adapting TV for comics, but it’s worth pointing out that Burns’s TV production and writing career shows the same kind of close interweaving of interests in fantasy, science fiction, horror, and pseudoscience that tends to predispose people to accepting the ancient astronaut theory. Burns has written, directed, or produced documentaries about Star Wars, superheroes, Universal horror monsters, (fictional) aliens, science fiction and horror movies, and (in another vein) trashy reality shows. Ancient Aliens and his other History conspiracy shows rather stand out on his list unless one thinks of them as an extension of the science fiction and fantasy world, or a reality show disguised as a documentary. I have no idea whether Burns actually believes the crap he foists onto viewers—anyone who would pass off Kendra on Top as “reality” or “television” certainly has a loose definition of both—but it’s always interesting to see how the ancient astronaut theory seems inseparable from science fiction and horror.

>“This is one of many examples of how hard it can be to truly know what might be a real owl, and what might be a screen image,” Clelland said.<

Well, for one thing, owls can't speak. Not even telepathically. I'm guessing neither Clelland nor Wright are familiar with the superstitions that consider owls to be bad omens, such as:

* An owl hooting or screeching at night could result in the death of a newborn baby, will cause the child to have an unhappy life, or possibly that the baby would become a witch. If the owl was heard screeching during cold weather it signaled that a storm was coming.

* Owls apparently are the only creatures that can live with ghosts, so if an owl is found nesting in an abandoned house, the place must be haunted.

* Death is often associated with owls such as if: an owl perches on the roof of your house or hearing an owl hooting constantly nearby.

* If a traveler dreamed of an owl, then that meant he would be robbed or possibly shipwrecked.

Or maybe they were influenced by the original /Clash of the Titans/, where Bubo the mechanical owl was a gift from the gods to aid Perseus?

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V

12/15/2015 12:00:14 pm

No, no, cats can live with ghosts, too, and when one is staring intently at something no human can see, it's because the cat is staring at a ghost. (Or, you know, the dust motes and dancing light phenomena that cats can see and humans can't because of how their eyes work differently.)

Also you forgot that owls are the spirits of the recently deceased in some Native American cultures, and that Welsh beliefs once indicated that an owl hooting among houses meant an unmarried girl had lost her virginity (bad bad thing, during those times). And, huh, I did not know that one Chinese belief indicated that owls were evil birds who cannibalized their own mothers.

Must be Reptilian psychic projections.

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Only Me

12/15/2015 12:32:55 pm

Yeah, there are a lot of superstitions surrounding our avian friends, both good and bad. Basically, Clellan and Wright are replacing folklore with belief in aliens while holding on to the spirituality at the core of such folklore.

DaveR

12/15/2015 02:14:22 pm

Owls do speak. I live in the woods and late one night was outside answering the call of nature when I looked up and perched in the tree above my head lit by the full moon, was an owl. I stared up at it as it stared down at me. Then it spoke.

"Who...who...whoooo."

"You...you...yooooo." I Replied.

It stared at me for another minute and then flew away.

Nobody in my house died.

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Bob Jase

12/15/2015 12:02:50 pm

Owls as alien messengers? Yeah - considering Joe Nickell's findings about Moth Man, the Flatwoods Monster and the Kelly-Hopkinsville goblins he may be correct though not right.

Meanwhile if that's a standard clipboard in the photos w/ the dog skeleton then its no where near seven feet long, five maybe which is still large but hardly a monster.

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spookyparadigm

12/15/2015 12:07:52 pm

If someone wants to walk a spiritual path involving owls, fine by me. So long as you don't start invoking bad "science" and conspiracy theories as evidence that rest of us are deluded about the owls, I won't care.

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Clete

12/15/2015 12:56:12 pm

I had a long talk with my pet owl, Oswald, and he assured me that he has no contact with aliens and is not a messenger from them. However, he warned me about my cat, Jessie. When I let him out at night, there is no telling who is communicating with or what he is doing.

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Uncle Ron

12/15/2015 01:09:12 pm

The owls are not what they seem.

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Duke of URL VFM #391

12/15/2015 01:58:54 pm

"we discover that the dog was seven feet long, not seven feet tall. Granted, seven feet is exceptionally long for a dog, but it’s certainly nowhere close to the dog being seven feet tall!"
Um... "Irish wolfhounds are the tallest of all dog breeds, sometimes reaching 7 feet tall on their hind legs." - AKC

Isn't the standard way of measuring a dog's height when it is standing on all fours, measured from foot to shoulder? I checked the AKC website, and they give the Irish wolfhound's height as 32-34 inches using that standard.

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Mike Jones

12/16/2015 09:43:43 am

This dog measured 28" at the shoulders. So while he was a large dog, has not exceptionally large.

DaveR

12/15/2015 02:17:30 pm

That's if they're standing up on their hind legs. The implication I think Ivan is making is that the dog was seven feet tall standing on all four legs.

@DaveR
I think you're probably correct - I just wanted to point out that the statement COULD be read either way, and one way he would be accurate.

DaveR

12/16/2015 02:09:47 pm

Duke,
This, I think, is a deliberate method employed by fringe theorists to twist facts and frame things in a manner supporting a particular theory or theories. By simply stating the dog was seven feet tall instead of seven feet long, the author must know most people will infer this dog was seven tall while standing on all four paws. The more I delve into fringe claims, the more I see the tricks employed by them to twist, or even outright ignore, facts to support their claims.

David Bradbury

12/15/2015 02:26:19 pm

The real story (and height to shoulder, in centimetres) of the Leiston Abbey dog, from an embarrassed archaeologist:
http://digventures.com/2014/10/digventures-and-the-bbc-one-show-devil-dog-black-shuck-returns/

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Richard P

12/15/2015 09:20:55 pm

Owls are very prominent as kind of disguised aliens in the movie The Fourth Kind. You usually say that fringe stuff is influenced by sci fi and vice versa; this might be an example of this.

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Killbuck

12/15/2015 11:29:58 pm

"Ancient Alien Theory". I personally get annoyed having the term theory applied here. A theory in science is a model that is supported by evidence, fact and experiment, that explains a natural process, condition, etc. It is not an observational supposition.

At best the Ancient Alien question might qualify as a hypothesis, an informed guess based on observation that proposes a possible conclusion, however it fails the test of falsifiability, due to proponents insisting it cannot be proved wrong.

I prefer to use the more accurate "Ancient Alien Question."

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DaveR

12/16/2015 11:54:11 am

I guess you can make that claim because they are making "...an informed guess based on observation..." and arriving at a conclusion. However, it appears their observations and conclusions involve a nearly complete rejection of all evidence contradicting these conclusions.

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Eric

12/16/2015 02:56:13 pm

The owl is associated with Athena in Greek mythology, so of course Athena is an alien and the Greeks worshiped aliens for the knowledge of how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop-which is the magical number three. Therefore, Tootsie Pops are alien food.

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DaveR

12/16/2015 03:56:57 pm

I knew Tootsie Pops were alien technology!

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killbuck

12/16/2015 11:46:06 pm

And lest we forget, the AA episode about aliens and the number 3 so there ya go. "is such a thing possible? I say yes!"

But back to cultural associations, the owl has similar mysterious connotations across cultures. A possible reason being its nocturnal nature, silent flight and eerie eyes, a creature of the night and worthy of mystery. My wife is Ojibwa-Shoshone, and both cultures geographically disparate, associate the owl with death. She will not touch an owl feather. Does this disparate association require alien connection? No, just the power of human imagination..

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